Guatemala, Revisited

And another thing... Our phone isn't working right now, at the house. So that's why I haven't been calling anyone. And you can't call me either. I'll borrow my roommates' cellphones sometimes, but really, that' just not going to happen regularly.

I've been thinking about my trip to Guatemala an awful lot lately. One of the reasons is that I'm in the midst of de-stuffing my life. Michael and I came to Chicago with very little. We mailed a couple boxes, but most everything else was what we could bring on the plane. But then... we stayed put for four years, gathering things in our space in the house. Now it's time to move, and to a place very far away. I've been whittling down my clothing. Got it down to what I wear regularly. Now it's time to move on to other things. "Things" things.

Michael and I were in Guatemala for two weeks, two years ago. But it seemed we were there much, much longer. Part of that was the nature of the trip... long travels by bus or van almost daily, going through missions and seeing and meeting people who live in extreme poverty, learning about a whole different lifestyle. Part of it seeming much longer was the fact that there were so many tourists on the trip that year. I admit it, we get annoyed with white people so easily. More so with white people who drink and party and shop on what we were told would be a mission and education trip. We were kind of bitter about that; it did make the days drag. Part of the time-extension was the fact that we got so, so sick very early on. For me, it was terrible for about two weeks. Then, it was pretty bad for another two months. I only just realized recently that I still have symptoms remaining two years later. One result of the trip seeming much longer than it was is that in some ways, 'the way things are now' didn't ever connect back to 'the way things were before.' So when I remembered recently that I haven't always had these stomach troubles, it came as kind of a shock.

But I digress.

The real point that keeps coming back to me over and over these days is that I have so much stuff. So many clothes, even in the "just what I wear" dresserful of clothes. I have things out the wazoo. I know that I have far fewer things than the average American. But it's really so much. The fact that I'm used to having so much bothers me sometimes. I'm so used to this American life.

In Guatemala, I had eight t-shirts. A couple pairs of pants or shorts, maybe. But I remember that eight was the magic number. Eight pairs of socks. Eight pairs of undies. In a two week trip, that meant that I only had to wash once, and I'd have an extra set if I had to change twice in one day for some reason.

I came home and did laundry and opened my dresser to put my eight shirts away and... my dresser was already full. I stared at it in awe. Then I started pulling out clothes upon clothes that I had already forgotten I owned. It was the same experience as going through our stuff in storage after our first year in Chicago, just before we gave it all away.

"I own all this?" I said to Michael. I just couldn't believe it. I thought, 'I could never possibly wear all of this.' Maybe it was just the sickness in my belly, but I felt queasy as I thought about the huge difference between the stuff I had here, and the stuff people had elsewhere on the planet.


...


Michael and I had a long conversation a few months ago, and I think about it often. We talk about classism a lot. It's a big issue, and it affects many different things. Michael is far more aware of classism in the same way that I am far more aware of sexism. He lived well growing up, compared to his mom, say, who grew up in the no-shoes-sort-of-poverty so prevalent in rural Tennessee. She finished third or fourth grade. It was no big deal in his family that he didn't finish high school. Education is an unnecessary luxury. His parents encouraged him to drop out of school. He was smarter than his teachers; he wasn't getting anything out of it.


But then he joined my world. My parents would scoff at the idea of us being the elite. I certainly did. But we are. College education is the standard of our peers. Someone without it is lower than we are. It's played out again and again. When Michael and I meet new people, they always, *always*, ask where we went to school and what we studied. Like it's the norm. Like it is not a fact that only 25% of Americans, even, ever finish a college degree. People get embarrassed when he tells them he never went to college. Because that makes him a deadbeat. But it doesn't. It just makes him poor. I get angry. He's had to put up with so much crap to join my world.


But our conversation. We talked about the dress code of the wealthy. Quite literally, only the wealthy can afford their dress code. We have all these cheap knock-offs sold at KMart and TJMaxx, but the wealthy can always tell. Michael insisted that even the act of dressing up is perpetuating a classist system that tells poor people, "You can never be like us, but keep trying anyway."


I've thought about that a lot, trying to design in my mind a way to dress nice that is inexpensive, and which doesn't play up to an unfair status quo. I haven't come up with anything yet. But as I go through my clothes, I think about that.

When I dress up on certain work days, I think about that. We'll be meeting with government officials, or whatever, and I have to dress nice so they'll listen to me. But I hate dressing up and walking around my neighborhood. I feel like the I'm the rich people that create this poverty all around us. It embarrasses me.

...

At Call To Action this past fall, I sat in on a speaker who talked about that old adage "You see from where you stand." You know, you stand in the resort in Jamaica and it looks like a fine and lovely country. You stand a mile away in the neighborhoods people live in and you see the poverty. You see the results of our Free Trade Agreement. You see how evil the World Bank and the IMF are. What you see is all a matter of where you look.

He told a story of a friend of his who'd spent fifteen years in missions in third world nations. He came back to the states and he opened his parents' refrigerator and he fell to his knees and wept for all the food they had, for all the people he'd known through the years who had died for lack of access to that refrigerator.

I have a bagful of lunch on my desk. I'm poor here in this country, but I eat well. Better than the people I serve. They come into the food pantry and they eat whatever we can give them because they have no other choices. But as a volunteer, I am well taken care of. I eat what I like. I eat what is healthy. I can afford to do that. It's unfair. It's unfair on my behalf. I reap the benefits of this American life. I am the elite because I have had the opportunity to live for free, to do what I want (life of service), and eat well and not pay bills.

We have so much. And just because we're used to it does not mean that we deserve it.